Green Home Sensors

There are an increasing number of products available designed to help us “go Green” and reduce our consumption of electricity, gas and water in our homes. With so many great products on the market, and more coming, which are best for my family and which will yield the best results? How do we know if they are really working for us? Furthermore, each home is different and each family has their own unique habits so something that saves significant money for one family might offer only marginal savings for another.

Green Home Sensors are a suite of wireless, easy-to-install sensors that live with our families to help us find how we are consuming energy thus allowing us to choose the habits to change and products to buy that will best serve us. Installing these sensors will help us to save money on our utility bills, live more comfortably and reduce our consumption of natural resources.

The sensors themselves interface to a wireless mesh network thus requiring very little power. The power they do consume is harvested from the resource they are monitoring (water flow, for example will power the water consumption sensors) so the sensors themselves are green. All the sensors report to a main hub which also serves as the home’s thermostat (thermostats are centrally located in the home). The main hub has a Wi-Fi connection to allow us to comfortably view the data in an organized manner from our home computer or any web-enabled device. Of course multiple thermostats can work in unison for homes with multiple zones. Allow Internet access to the main hub and email updates or alerts can be issued for unchecked water flow, extreme temperatures or monitor for flooding by adding a water presence sensor; perfect for the vacation home.

Sensors include water flow and temperature, HVAC flow and temperature, room temperature, outdoor temperature and electrical power usage. More sensors can be added at any time. Combinations of sensors will help us gauge HVAC efficiency and effectiveness, insulation gaps (if some rooms experience temperature variations more quickly than others) and so much more. The web interface of the main hub allows families to place notes at specific dates and times to help identify use or to mark an event (new high-efficiency furnace, for example).

The market potential is huge – every home can reap the benefits from such a suite of sensors. But there is no reason to stop at residences. Installing these sensors in businesses will help us conserve resources on an even larger scale. Being the first of its kind this product will surely see large volumes of production. These small sensors use standard electronics that can be manufactured in any assembly factory so we can search for the best value.

I hope you are as excited about the potential for this product as I am. For further details, please feel free to contact me.